Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian (17 page)

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I’ve also had other TV kids on other sitcoms, people whom I love and who are mostly grown-up now—the incredible Kat Dennings and Brie Larson on a great short-lived show called
Raising Dad,
and the super-talented Jared Kusnitz and G. Hannelius on a shorter-lived show called
Surviving Suburbia
. I’m told I may one day work with kids again because the statute of limitations has run out on all of the restraining orders.

As whacked as I may be as a person sometimes, I take very seriously the responsibility of child actors in general. Most of them didn’t even choose to go into this profession, and all of a sudden they’re thrown on a set with a lot of people who become their “instant family.”

It’s a conundrum for actors—some work the rest of their lives, most do not. But to be a child actor is often to be a survivor and go deeper as a person than a lot of people ever have to. Childhood is hard enough, and to throw in that additional component can be complicated.

I treasure the relationships I have had—and will always have—with all my gifted friends whom I had the privilege of getting to know through work, when they were very young humans. They keep me young. I am much more responsible as a man today than I would be without them in my life.

And when little kids somehow find themselves in an audience when I’m performing as a standup—because their parents do not know the tenor of my comedy, I do not swear until they are escorted into the lobby and quickly given a shot of Jack at the bar.

Chapter 7

THE BIPOLAR WORLD OF FAMILY TELEVISION

When it first started, little boys used to call it “the people-who-fall-down show.” Men used to call it “the guys-who-get-hit-in-the-nuts show.” I thought of it fondly as what TV host Tom Bergeron to this day calls “the annuity.” I’m talking of course about
America’s Funniest Home Videos,
a blooper show no one had ever seen the likes of before it originally aired. I was fortunate to be invited to become the first host.

For years people have asked me, “Who wrote your jokes on that video show?” And the answer is: I wrote ’em with two Canadian gentlemen. Back then there was an 18 percent exchange rate on humor. One of those two Canadians was Todd Thicke, who still produces and writes the show today for Tom. The other writer was Robert Arnott. He wrote for the Smothers Brothers show and many variety programs throughout the heyday of variety television.

When we were working on
AFHV
together, Arnott had a very funny saying . . . he told me he was waiting for his “fuck-you money,” so he could afford to never have to work again, but the most he’d come up with ’til this point was “Ffffff . . .”

Together, he and I and Todd would write fifty-five pages a week, and that includes the wraparound host-y stuff that I was as critical of as my critics. It doesn’t really help, but when someone’s about to insult your work, I guess there’s a sense of relief that you’ve beaten them to the punch by trashing yourself first.

Another case of retrospect: I am incredibly proud of our work on the show. We also wrote—and I’d record—the voice-overs, where I would do my five different voices of kids falling off of things, animals falling off of things, and pants falling off of people where we’d blur their ass and balls. Today, things don’t need much blurring. Just some occasional ass crack or wiener coverage. We have really evolved as a culture.

Daniel Tosh has one of the highest-art versions of the show today, but every clip show is easily trumped by YouTube’s onslaught of intentionally and unintentionally made clips. I can’t believe I was at the forefront of the “fall down on tape” movement. I am the self-proclaimed pioneer of pain.

Actually, the man who hired me, Vin Di Bona, we could crown as the Emperor of Anguish. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. I was just looking for some alliteration, which was always the key to writing good blooper-show dialogue. Pedantically plodding, pursuing priceless pre-records of people precariously punched in their penises.

What a brilliant lead-in for a tape block of men-getting-hit-in-the-nuts copy! We would just hope we could get it past Broadcast Standards and Practices.

BS & P. Broadcast Standards and Practices. That’s the department at a network—whether it’s one person at a desk at a cable network or a ten-person division of a major network television company—that tells you what you can and cannot say. I used to try to say things that were “edgy” on the video show, like “Here’s a bunch of clips spewing in your face . . .” “Let’s thrust forward into this next package.” In any case, no one seemed to know or care about my “secret code” of wannabe irreverence.

By the way, I really liked our ABC network’s broadcast standards executive. Seriously, she was a kind smart lady who knew we wanted to say
cock and balls
on the air, so she had to research to make sure there weren’t any new secret metaphors for
cock and balls
that she didn’t know about. That’s a hard job for a person with dignity—to have to go out of your way to look for cock and balls.

One time I wanted to say
sheep dip
. Innocuous enough. If I recall, there was some video with sheep in it and I was trying to refer to stepping in their excrement. In the recorded voice-over, I simulated a flock of sheep complaining they were “stepping in sheep dip.” In a sheep voice I said, “Look out, Daisy, you’re gonna get your pretty feet covered in sheep dip! Bahhhh!!” The BS & P lady had a problem with it. Apparently sheep dip is a real thing, a chemical the sheep is dipped in before being sheared for its wool. She forbade me to say it because of legal concerns.

What that means, I don’t know. Maybe farmers would have found it offensive. Or maybe she didn’t want to run the risk that a kind farmer might be watching the show with his family and, upon hearing me mention sheep dip in the context of “sheep feces,” he’d get up during the commercial break, go to the barn to check on his sheep, suddenly find himself disoriented, and accidentally step in shit, ruin his slippers, and sue the network.

Let’s be honest, she was just trying to keep me from implying the word
shit
on the air. Real problems we had. Embarrassing for me to admit today; I took it all very seriously. But I let that one go. You gotta pick your battles. Silly funny discussions over a silly funny simple little blooper show.

In today’s world, and on today’s incarnation of a home-video-type show, they would not only step in sheep shit but would show it coming directly from the source and then have a dumb farm guy falling facedown in it.

The video show itself was a miracle of television history. And me suddenly becoming the host overnight was another very fortunate moment in my broadcasting career. I was acting on “the House that was Full” and I got a call from my friend and manager Brad telling me this gentleman Vin Di Bona wanted me to host a clip show that was made completely of people’s . . . 
timpani drumroll
 . . . home videos. His producer Steve Paskay had seen me on
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
narrating my actual wedding video on the air when I was twenty-six.

Steve and Vin thought I seemed like a natural fit to host a show where people would send in their personal tapes of their lives. Good idea. Beginning of YouTube. Changed the world of television. And I got the job. And I thought it was just going to be a one-hour special. What I didn’t know was, I’d stepped in sheep dip once again.

They’d sent me a VHS videotape of people falling off of things, getting hit in the nuts, getting married, getting hit in the nuts again; babies talking in full sentences; and animals going insane. I was immediately drawn to the raw product. The pilot hour aired against a rerun of
60 Minutes
at seven o’clock on a Sunday night, and it beat it in the ratings. The next day we were picked up for thirteen episodes. I was again the star of a show that was meant for “family hour.”

The seven
P
.
M
. hour on a Sunday meant something special to me because
Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color
had been on NBC at seven thirty
P
.
M
. when I was a kid. And I loved it. And I could watch it with my parents, which is not something most kids wanted to do. Watch TV with
my
parents. My parents were actually so proud when I became the host of the video show, they would’ve probably gone door-to-door themselves to random families’ houses to watch them watching me on it. They were that proud.

When the opportunity arose with
AFHV,
I was all in and committed to it as fully as I could be. I was a lucky bastard. Most of the time, the show was fun to make. And the videos were funny. And people let us into their living rooms, and bedrooms, and bathrooms. Many tapes did not make the air. And I saw some of them and am still damaged to this day. I mean, we
really
got to see inside people’s bedrooms and bathrooms—and it wasn’t pretty. Sometimes it looked like they had been created by the set decorator from
The Silence of the Lambs
.

The funniest video they couldn’t air back in the day was one that everyone all over the world has now seen: The monkey in a tree who scratches his asshole and then sniffs his hand and then falls out of the tree. From the smell of his own asshole.

I wanted to show the clip when I was hosting
Saturday Night Live,
but ABC or the producers of the video show wouldn’t allow it to be shown. The reason given was that it was ABC property. Who would want to claim that, right? “No, you cannot have the clip of the monkey scratching his asshole—it’s property of ABC.” But it finally aired on the show. I saw that as an animal-rights victory. And a victory for anyone who’s ever had an itchy asshole.

The most upsetting tapes were those where people really got hurt. I don’t do snuff. It’s wrong. Although as I’ve said in my stand-up, it
is
one take and you’re outta there. Okay, so a young screener who worked for the show sent to my home a tape of a guy wearing a wetsuit, standing in front of a pool with a rubber trampoline-like cover over it. Sounds ominous and enticing, don’t you think? The screener told me, “Watch this, we can’t air it on the show, but it was made especially for you, Bob.” I put the tape in my VCR. By the way, I just typed
VCR
—that stands for “videocassette recorder.” You can buy one online right now for ten dollars, hard cash. Wow.

Another fast detour—one of my early jokes was a palindrome. “
Wo
w backward is
wow
. And
wow
upside down is
Mom
. And
Mom
upside down is Dad’s favorite thing.”

All right, so this guy is yelling directly into the camera, standing with his rubber-covered pool directly in front of him. Okay, maybe it wasn’t rubber, but whatever it was made of, it was pulled taut like a trampoline. The gentleman looked a bit like the Wild Man of Borneo, or the Tasmanian Devil, whichever means more to you at this moment. And into camera he yells something like, “Okay, Bob Saget, I got a video for you, and it’s gonna be great!!”

And then he climbs up this ladder leaning against a tree, goes up about ten rungs, and yells back to the camera, “Okay, Bob Saget—here I go!!” Or something like that—it was impossible to understand him, because his face was covered with hair and much of it looked to be growing from inside of his mouth as well. It was obvious he was going to attempt to dive onto the pool cover from off the ladder and bounce, daredevil/WWE style.

So I’m watching this at home alone thinking, Okay, he’s gonna jump off the ladder and land on the pool cover and perhaps it’ll all cave in and he will possibly almost drown—but he’ll be okay, because the intern screener who sent it to me wouldn’t have sent it if the guy
wasn’t
gonna be okay, right?

But suddenly the guy’s foot gets caught at the top of the ladder while he’s saying, “Watch this, Bob Saget!!” and then he screams and falls off the ladder as it drops out from under him. And the scream is
loud
and the sound of him smashing onto the cement ten feet below is LOUDER. And I’m watching this clip, and it keeps rolling—and he isn’t moving. Then it runs for another ten seconds—and still he hasn’t moved. After another twenty seconds it slowly fades to black. Without the man ever moving again.

I picked up the phone and called the screener directly: “Man, what the fuck did you send me? That’s snuff. Did the guy die? What did you send me?!”

The screener—who was a nice kid—was laughing: “No, Bob, he just broke a few ribs, he’s fine.”

I told him, “Well next time please put a Post-it on it that says, ‘The guy didn’t die, he just broke a few ribs.’ I can’t do snuff, man!”

Another video I can’t get out of my mind was also not airable. Two supersized people in a shower having sex. Smashing their parts up hard against the shower door. Laughing and schtupping. It goes on for a little while and then the shower door breaks, and the two naked lovers fall hard onto the bathroom floor, still laughing. Even though at this point they are mostly below the locked-off camera frame, you can still hear them laughing hysterically, flopping around on the floor like two sea manatees. And you know there must have been broken glass on the floor, but they didn’t seem to care, just a-laughin’ and a-laughin’. They must’ve really been fucked-up.

Both the shower video and the pool one are really nothing compared to what you see these days, on Daniel Tosh’s, Rob Derdyk’s shows, and elsewhere. I do wish I could have aired them. Not for the edginess or nudity, but so I could have had the pleasure of announcing, “And the winner is . . . Supersize naked people having sex until the shower door breaks!!!” And so I could have brought them up onstage in body casts with their cuts healing, still giggling as they accepted the check for $10,000.

When hosting
SNL
in 1995, the great comedy writer Al Franken, who is now an esteemed senator from Minnesota, wrote a sketch I helped contribute to. The premise was a wrong-as-could-be parody of an episode of
AFHV
. He had titled it
America’s Funniest Hate Videos,
and it was me hosting the show but with all . . . hate videos.